Over the past week or so I've kept myself busy building "The Shield Lands" module. Here's a kind of stream of consciousness progress report. It isn't required reading, trust me.Hardware/software woes: I've hit several snags which aren't quite worked out yet. Apparently, the last update Bioware released (1.65 -> 1.66) conflicts with my out-of-the-box video card, crashing the game every 5 to 15 minutes. It took me a few days to realize that this was the problem, so I wasted some time trying to "optimize" the hakpak, taking it from 50 meg compressed to 18 meg compressed. Play-testing on my parents computer, though, I realized that not all machines accept DDS formatted textures, which are 10% the size of TGA formatted textures, so I went back and plucked all of the original textures out of the components I had monkeyed with. I've accepted the fact that I'll be putzing around with the hakpak for a while, and will continue to do the actual building of the module, when I see something wrong with the hakpak I'll go in and turn a couple of screws. I plan on e-mailing Bioware to see when the graphics card bug will be resolved, if ever.
Treasure types: I made a new treasure type system! It works great, and provides a large and varied gamut of stuff that is appropriate to each individual monster. Each monster has a treasure code attached to it, so no longer will all members of a population be carrying the same distribution of stuff. (Which leads to the perception that goblin society is rather egalitarian, with an even distribution of wealth... Where do I sign up?)
Monster looting: Unfortunately for our heroes, what goes around comes around; I was brainstorming and I decided that if I were DMing, and a PC was left comatose with a group of goblins, he'd probably awaken to find that they took everything, even his socks, and that his mouth was stuffed with any number of unpleasant things. Monster looting works as follows: Certain types of monsters will loot, others won't. Unintelligent undead, animals and giant insects will never loot. Goblinoids and brigands will always loot. If looters are left, unthreatened, with a dead PC, they will take turns taking items and gold from the body (1d4 items and half-the-gold, per looter). This takes roughly 30 seconds per looter, creating a buffer in which the looting session could be broken up by passing adventurers. Items looted go into the monster population's treasure type, to show up again later, usually on the tougher members of the population. Looted items will carry over session to session. Also, because of the new A.I. I installed, the items will likely be used against the PCs. There's a "safe box" system back in town, monster looting should encourage PCs to use it.
The new A.I.: I installed this code package yesterday, mostly with an eye towards making hirelings more useful, rather than the money draining liability they were before. The change made monsters attack PCs that were "bleeding to death", though, so I had to tweak the module's "On Dying" routine. Now the module puts a DC 100 Sanctuary spell on bleeding characters. Tacky? Yes, but it has the same in-game effect as making the monsters neutral to the PC; Which is the less intrusive method, but it no longer works. Otherwise, with the new A.I., monsters will meander about, and sneak if they have the skill.
A new quest system: An automated quest system has been Jason's major request since the beginning of the project. The problem was that I couldn't tie quests to places, because the structure of my module was far too chaotic. An example: Let's say a low-level PC is quested to retrieve an item from a cave infested with giant ants. Fair enough, but before the PC arrives at the cave, someone traipses through and thins out the ant population enough that a high-level undead army nearby is able to take over the cave. Now the low-level PC has this quest that leads him to his death. Not cool. With my new treasure type system, I can attach quest items to monster populations and not places, which is also far more fertile in terms of story. I've yet to work out the details for it, but it should only take a day or two.
Okay, I'm going to get back to work on this... I'll check-in later.
